Plausible Analytics VS Ackee

There was a time when open source software meant “functional, but clunky.” That’s changed. Tools like Plausible (analytics), N8N (automation), Umami (web stats), and Vaultwarden (password manager) are beautifully built, stable, and powerful. Many match or even beat their commercial alternatives.

Plausible is a privacy-focused website analytics tool that provides simple, actionable insights into website traffic and visitor behavior. It prioritizes data privacy by offering transparent analytics without cookies, tracking scripts, or personal data collection.

Perfect for companies running under tight EU privacy regulations. Find more: Plausible analytics

In this interview, Marko Saric shared his thoughts on privacy and running a bootstrapped SaaS business. Plausible integration is already available in Open SaaS as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We hope this interview helps you understand the value of such a product, and the nature of running an open source business.

Plausible Analytics (https://plausible.io/) is a lightweight, privacy-focused analytics tool that’s designed to be simple and easy to use. Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible gives you just the metrics you need—without the bloat.

Would this also work with something like Plausible (https://github.com/plausible/analytics) which uses ClickHouse to store web analytics data, or it primarily for log data?

I've actually had this discussion with Plausible directly back in 2022[1], and more recently with the lawyer they had write a blog post on the topic[2]. I wrote an article on it, that was recently discussed here on HN [3].

The response from Plausible is essentially "we've checked with legal council, and stand by the statement". The conversation with the lawyer started out well, but he stopped responding when I asked about the ePD, not GDPR.

There generally seems to be a lot of confusion, even in legal circles, about what ePD requires informed consent for. Many think that only PII requires consent, or think that anonymization bypasses it. That amount of confusion makes it very easy for a layman (e.g. Plausible) to find _someone_ willing to back up their viewpoint.

The EDPB released a guideline in 2023 that explicitly states that what Plausible et al. are doing is covered by the ePD's consent requirement, but that doesn't mean that any of the companies offering it are interested in saying it out loud.

1: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963

Take a look as ackee as well :)

Proxying the requests to Ackee through Netlify comes with some advantages:

I've used Ackee (https://ackee.electerious.com/) for some time now and I love it!

Ackee - Free Alternative - Probably the most similar solution to Umami and it would have been my second choice. It seems to be pretty popular and well worth checking out.

Ackee is another open source analytics platform you can deploy on Railway. I first tried Ackee but I prefer Umami because of its Realtime Dashboard that allows me to see active sessions and what webpages are being visited at this very moment.

Ackee has a great looking dashboard (Ackee dashoard demo) and the maintainer of this project also plans to support its development (correct me if I am wrong). If you want to support him, donate here. Thus making it pay what you want to model (except for the hosting :p)

Open source code available at https://github.com/electerious/Ackee